gordianplotfandomcom-20200214-history
THEORIES OF THE LUDICROUS.
WHY THE RIDICULOUS GIVES PLEASURE THEORIES OF THE LUDICROUS. Hobbes. —The lowest, narrowest view of the laughable is presented by Hobbes, and is characteristic of all his phi losophy. He says : Laughter is a sudden glory arising from a sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves by comparison with the inferiority of others or our own former infirmity. The insufficiency of this explanation is well pointed out by Campbell, who remarks : If you make but a trifling alteration of the expression, so as to destroy the wit (which often turns on a very little circumstance), without altering the real import of the sentence (a thing not only possible but easy), you will produce the same opinion and the same contempt, and consequently will give the same subject of triumph, yet without the least tendency to laugh. Haven. --Even Dr. Haven, who points out that it can not be simply the conception of inferiority in others which causes laughter, since if it were so the proud, self- conceited, and supercilious would abound in that genuirte and hearty merriment which in fact they never experience, himself accepts what Hobbes considers the essence of the ludicrous as at least an invariable accompaniment. Thus : The person laughing is always, for the time being, superior, in his own estimation, at least, to the person or thing laughed at. It is some awkwardness, some blunder, some defect of body, mind, or manner, some lack of sharpness or of sense, some perceived incongruity between the true character or position of the individual and his present circumstances, that excites our laughter and constitutes the ludicrous. Hazlitt goes further: The ludicrous is when there is a contradiction between the object and our expectations, heightened by some deformity or inconvenience, that is, by being contrary to what is customary or desirable; as the ridiculous, which is the highest degree of the laughable, is that which is contrary not only to custom, but to sense and reason. Bain quotes from Quintilian : A saying that causes laughter is generally based on false reasoning, has always something low in it, is often purposely sunk into buffoonery, is never honorable to the subject of it. Sir Philip Sidney argues that laughter is not wholly agreeable : Delight we scarcely do but in things that have a conveniency to ourselves or to the general nature. Laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature. Delight hath a joy in it, either permanent or present ; laughter hath only a scornful tickling. Laughter Not Necessarily Scornful. —This last phrase at once embodies and refutes this class of theories. We know that our merriest laughter is not scornful, and that any theory that so represents it must be erroneous. For instance, good Deacon Robinson, heading a procession of Sunday-school scholars as they march through the aisles of a crowded church, strikes up, "Hold the Fort, " forgetful that the second stanza will begin : "See the mighty hosts advancing, Satan leading on. " When that line is reached everybody smiles. But the smile is directed, not at the deacon, but at the incongruity and in proportion to the incongruity will be the feeling of amusement, so that the louder the laughter the more emphatic will be the testimony that the deacon's life is exemplary. There is no sudden conception of inferiority in the deacon, as Hobbes would have it. The audience is not rendered superior to him, even in its own estimation, as Haven would make us believe. The laughter is not the "scornful tickling" of Sir Philip Sidney, but a burst of merriment, in which the deacon himself is probably the heartiest to join. When the good brother, in a prayer- meeting, attempted, in the absence of the chorister, to start the hymn, "I love to steal a while away, " and after beginning several times, "I love to steal —, " "I love to steal —, " "I love to steal —, " found it impossible to carry on the tune, and broke down, it was very much to his credit if his fellow- worshippers were simply amused ; for there have been men from whom that unpremeditated avowal would produce an awkward silence. When a bereaved widower, answering a condoling friend who asks if the recent death was not sudden, replies doubtfully, "Well, yes, rather, for her ; " when a bashful wedding-guest wishes the bride many happy returns ; when a college professor, asked for leave of absence to attend the funeral of a second cousin, tells the student he supposes he shall have to let him go, but that he really wishes it were a nearer relative ; when typographical errors give us a list of awards at the Paris Exposition, issued "by order of his Royal Highness, the Prince of Males ; " report that a cow upon the railway track was literally cut into calves, and transform a familiar sentence in the Prayer- Book from "We shall all be changed in the twinkling of an eye" into "We shall all be hanged in the twinkling of an eye, "—in all these and thousands of similar instances there is in our laughter no ingredient of contempt. We simply perceive an incongruity that provokes our merriment, and that merriment is thoroughly good-natured. Those who see in such instances a disparagement of the individual, fail to distinguish between the absurd in conception and the absurd in reality. Does the pupil who in the expression, "Mm. Candle's husband, " parses Mrs. Candle's "as a proper feminine noun, third, singular, possessive, and governed by husband, " suppose that Mrs. Caudle herself was governed by her husband ? Not if he has been taught to distinguish between a grammatical relation of two words and a real relation of the two objects that the words represent. No more should he fail to see that it is one thing to laugh at the absurdity of associating a ridiculous idea with an individual and quite another to laugh at the individual as himself ridiculous. The keenest thrusts are those of the tongue. The bitterest enmity may wreak itself in a jest. But sarcasm, irony, contempt, are not essential to the ludicrous. The truly funny is impersonal. "To resolve laughter into an expression of contempt, " says Coleridge, "is contrary to fact, and laughable enough. " A later writer tells us : That a gratified sense of superiority is at the root of barbarous laughter may be at least half the truth. But there is a loving laughter. in which the only recognized superiority is that of the ideal self, the God within, holding the mirror and the scourge for our own pettiness, as well as our neighbor's. We may go further than this. Much that is ludicrous is sheer nonsense. De Quincey tells us how Charles Lamb used to visit him, and join with him in laughter over the silliest conceits. Leigh Hunt says : "The difference between nonsense not worth talking and nonsense worth it is simply this: the former is a result of want of ideas ; the latter of a superabundance of them. " He adds that nonsense, in the good sense of the word, is a very sensible thing in its season, and is confounded with the other only by people of a shallow gravity who cannot afford to joke. "These gentlemen, he says, live upon credi and would not have it inquired into. They are grave, not because they see or feel the contrast of mirth, for then they would feel the mirth itself ; but because gravity is their safest mode of behavior. They must keep their minds sitting still, because they are incapable of a motion that in not awkward. They are waxen images among the living, the deception is undone if they stir ; or hollow vessels covered up, which may be taken for full ones ; the collision of wit jars against them, and strikes out against their hollowness. " Nonsense talked by men of wit and understanding in the hour of relaxation is of the very finest essence of conviviality, and a treat delicious to those who have the sense to comprehend it ; but it implies a trust in the company not always to be risked. —ThsBAKU. Herbert Spencer. —A wholly different account of laughter is given by Mr. Spencer. He starts with the assumption that a given amount of feeling must somewhere generate an equivalent manifestation of force, and that if of the channels the force would naturally take, one or more are closed, more must be taken by the other channels. He goes on to show that the muscular action of laughter has this peculiarity, that it is purposeless. The contractions of the muscles are quasi- convulsive, and result simply from an uncontrollable discharge of energy that takes the most familiar paths, first through the organs of speech, producing a smile ; and, if that proves insuffi dent, through the organs of respiration, producing laughter. Now, why is our nervous energy prompted to escape through these paths upon certain perceptions of incongruity ? "It is an insufficient explanation that in these cases laughter is result from the pleasure we take in escaping from the restraint of grave feelings. That this is a part cause is true. Doubtless very often, as Mr. Bain says, it is the coerced form of seriousness without the reality that gives us that stiff posiCon from which contact with triviality or vulgarity relieves us to our uproarious delight. ' And in so far as mirth is canard by the gush of agreeable feeling that follows the cessation of mental strain it further illustrates the general principle above set forth. But no explanation is thus afforded of the mirth which ensues when the short silence between theandanteand allegro of one of Beeth ven's symphonies is broken by a load sneeze. In this and hoots of like cases the mental tension is not coerced, but spontaneous —not disagreeable, but agreeable ; and the coming impressions to which the attention is directed promise a gratification which few if any desire to escape. Hence, when the unlucky sneeze occurs, it cannot be that the laughter of the audience is due simply to the release from an irkso Ito attitude of mind ; some other cause must be sought. "This cause we shall arrive at by carrying our analysis a step farther. We have but to consider the quantity of feeling that exists under such cinumslances, and then to ask what are the conditions that determine its discharge, to at once reach a solution. "Take a case. You are sitting in a theatre absorbed 111 theprAgress of an interesting drama. Some climax has been reached which arouses your sympathies—say reconciliation between the hero and heroine after a long and painful misunderstanding. The feelings excited by this scene are not of a kind from which you seek relief, but are, on the contrary, a relief from the painful feelings with which you have witnessed the previous estrangement. Moreover, the sentiments these fictitious personage have for the moment inspired you with are not such as would lead you to rejoice in any indignity offered to them, but rather such as would make you resent the indignity. "And now, while you are contemplating the reconciliation with a pleasurable sympathy there appears from behind the scenes a lame kid, which, having stared at the audience, walks up to the lovers and miffs at them. You cannot help joining in the roar which greets thiscoalre'empa Inexplicable Its is this irrzsistible burst on the hypothesis of a pleasure from relative increase of self-impertrince when witnessing the humiliation of others, it is readily explicable if we consider what in such a case must become of the feeling that existed at the time the incongruity arose. "A large mass of emotion had been produced, or, to speak in physiological language, a large portion of the nervous system was in a state of tension. There was also great expectation with regard to the further evolution of the scene—a quantity of vague, nasicent thought and emotion, Into which the existing quantity of thought and emotion was about to pass "Had there been no interruption, the body of new ideas and feelings next excited would have sufficed to absorb the whole of the liberated nervous energy. But now this large amount of nervous energy, instead of being allowed to expend itself in producing an equivalent amount of the new thoughts and emotions, is suddenly checked in Its flow. The channels along which the discharge was about to take place are suddenly closed. The new channel opened—that afforded by the appearance and proceedings of the kid—is a small one; the ideas and feelings suggested are not numerous and massive enough to carry off the nervous energy to be expended. The excess must therefore discharge itself In some other directions ; and in the way already explained there results an efflux through motor nerves to various classes of muscles, producing the half-convulsive motions we call laughter. " Mr. Darwin quotes this explanation, and thus corroborates it : "An observation bearing on this point was made by a correspondent during the recent siege of Paris, namely, that the German soldiers, after strong excitement from exposure to extreme danger, were particularly apt to burst into loud laughter at the smallest joke. So again when young children are just beginning to cry an unexpected event will sometimes suddenly turn their crying into laughter, which apparently serves equally well to expend their surplus energy. " The difficulty with Mr. Spencer's theory is that it accounts for everything except just what it purports to explain. What we call laughter is not the half- convulsive motions. These are but the expression of laughter. To draw out the muscles of the face into a forced smile is tiresome, and becomes painful if continued. Still more tiresome and painful is the muscular motion of a hearty laugh. Says Mr. Darwin : During excessive laughter the whole body is thrown backward and shakes, or is almost convulsed ; the respiration is much disturbed, the head and face become gorged with blood with the veins distended, and the orbicular muscles are spasmodically contracted in order to protect the eyes. Hence, as formerly remarked, it is scarcely possible to point out any difference between the tearstained face of a person after a paroxysm of excessive laughter and after a crying fit. It is probably due to the close similarity of the spasmodic movements caused by these widely different emotions that hysteric persons alternately laugh and cry with violence, and that young children pass suddenly from one to the other state. Another scientist says : No doubt the sound of laughter is one of the very earliest and oddest of human cries. It is certainly an astonishing sound, and one that is very difficult to listen to and analyze without prejudice, and a remote feeling of sympathy. The best way to study it that I know is to seize on opportunities when one is being constantly interrupted in reading a serious book by shouts of laughter from a party of strangers ; one can then note the curious variety of spasmodic sounds produced, and marvel that men in the midst of rational conversation should be compelled by necessity to break off suddenly their use of language and find relief and enjoyment in the utterance of perfectly inarticulate and animal howls like those of the Long- armed Gibbon. We all know what it is to laugh till we ache ; till we are compelled to beg our companion to desist front his funny stories, and forcibly to wrest our mind from a contemplation it too keenly enjoys, lest we laugh ourselves to death. If Mr. Spencer's theory of laughter were adequate, therefore, laughter would be a painful experience, to be avoided, like a severe cold or the fever and ague. But, as we have seen, he describes everything but the laughter. He tells us what are the motions that accompany laughter, and why we laugh with certain muscles, instead of swinging our arms or turning a somersault. But in what the amusement of laughter consists, and why we so enjoy it that in this amusement we forget the discomfort of the accompanying motions, he wholly ignores. Aristotle. —From these and many other theories we go back to the definition made by Aristotle, which Coleridge declares "as good as can be. " A definition which twenty-two centuries cannot improve is worth attention. "The ludicrous arises, “says Aristotle, “from surprise at perceiving something out of its usual place when the unusualness is not accompanied by a sense of danger. " Such surprise is always pleasurable ; and it is observed that surprise accompanied by a sense of danger becomes tragic. Here, then, are the two elements of the ludicrous—the incongruous and the inconvenient. Between the two is a poise, and the balance differs with every mind. What annoys one amuses another. Even to the same mind annoyances may be repeated till they become amusing, and one rather hopes they will accumulate in order to complete the joke. Sam Weller and Mark Tapley were too absorbed in the incongruous to be disturbed by the inconvenient. A boy was cuffed, and slapped, and shaken, and pounded for snow-balling an irascible old farmer. The boy laughed. The farmer cuffed and slapped and shook and pounded harder. The boy laughed louder. Finally the farmer became exhausted, and exclaimed : "Boy, what are you laughing at ?" "Why, at the joke on you : I ain't the boy!" The same difference is observed in the effect on us of the experience of others. For instance, a man in Fulton laid his finger on the table in front of a buzz-saw to feel the motion of the air. In the rapid revolution of the saw he did not perceive how far the teeth extended, and his finger was instantly cut off. Even his pain was lost in astonishment, and the foreman approached to ask how it happened. "Why, I just laid my finger down so, " he explained ; and whiz went the saw through a second finger. Now, that story will be funny or tragic according to the physical sympathy of the person who hears it. It appeared in the funny columns of the newspapers ; but it was read by many who have a Donatello's shrinking from the sight or even the thought of physical suffering, in whom the recital of the story made the flesh creep. Nothing is more to be remembered in conversation than that the ludicrous is not an absolute relation, but depends entirely upon the mina of the person perceiving the incongruity. The merry jokes of the dissecting-room would cost many a man his dinner and many a woman her consciousness. Hence the would-be wit, is often a terror to society. Where he sees only the incongruous he forces upon his hearers the vulgar, the disgusting, the terrible. Wit generally succeeds more from being happily addressed than from its native poignancy. A jest calculated to spread at a gaming table may be received with perfect indifference should it happen to drop into a mackerel-boat. —Ckmunerra Those who have seen the play of "Jane Shore" will remember what a huge joke it seemed to her keepers to hurl the poor frozen, starving creature upon her feet again, and drive her on into the pitiless storm. Well is it for any of us if we have never laughed at the misery of others because we lacked the sympathy to perceive it. A lady attired in profound crape entered a car and abandoned herself to melancholy. A woman behind her, with red nose, blue veil and green spectacles, leaned forward and inquired : "Lost somebody ? " A barely perceptible nod answered the question without inviting another, but the inquisition proceeded. " Father ? " A shake. " Brother ? " A shake. " Husband ?" A nod. "Church member ?" A nod. "Life insured ? " A nod. "Then what are you moping about ? He's all right, and so are you. " The sense of the humorous is as incompatible with tenderness and respect as with compassion. No man would laugh to see a little child fall ; and he would be shocked to see such an accident happen to an old woman, or to his father. It is a beautiful thing to observe the boundaries which nature has affixed to the ridiculous, and to notice how soon it is swallowed up by the more illustrious feelings of our minds. Where is the heart so hard that could bear to see the awkward resources and contrivances of the poor turned into ridicule ? Who could laugh at the fractured, ruined body of a soldier? Who is so wicked as to amuse himself with the infirmities of extreme old age ? or to find subject for humor in the weakness of a perishing, dissolving body ? Who is there that does not feel himself disposed to overlook the little peculiarities of the truly great and wise, and to throw a veil over that ridicule which they have redeemed by the magnitude of their talents and the splendor of their virtues? Whoever thinks of turning into ridicule our great and ardent hope of a world to come ? Whenever the man of humor meddles with these things he is astonished to find that in all the great feelings of their nature the mass of mankind always think and act aright ; that they are ready enough to laugh, but that they are quite as ready to drive away with indignation and contempt the light fool who comes with the feather of wit to crumble the bulwarks of truth and to beat down the Temples of God. --SYDNST Sierra. Category:Humor